Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Acer debuts Aspire S3 Ultrabook for $899

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Summary: And here come the Ultrabooks. Intel’s much-hyped alternative to the MacBook Air is finally reaching the market, with Acer launching its first Ultrabook today. At $899, the Aspire S3 Ultrabook comes in well below the magic $1,000 price point that could blunt consumer interest. For that price you get a 2.98-pound system that’s 0.51 inches thick [...]

And here come the Ultrabooks. Intel’s much-hyped alternative to the MacBook Air is finally reaching the market, with Acer launching its first Ultrabook today.

At $899, the Aspire S3 Ultrabook comes in well below the magic $1,000 price point that could blunt consumer interest. For that price you get a 2.98-pound system that’s 0.51 inches thick at its thinnest point, with a 13.3-inch, 1,366×768 resolution display. You also get an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of memory, and both a 20GB solid-state drive and a 320GB hard drive.

Acer also promises a number of conveniences to help the S3 Ultrabook compete with the Air. Making use of that SSD drive, the Green Instant On feature can wake up the system from Sleep mode in just 2 seconds. When the laptop goes into Deep Sleep mode (after 8 hours of nonuse), it can wake in 6 seconds. Instant Connect Technology allows you to connect to the Internet from Sleep Mode in a mere 2.5 seconds.

The S3 Ultrabook promises 6 hours of battery life for continuous activity, and a whopping 50 days of standby power. Acer also says it’s tweaked the notebook’s construction to dissipate heat more efficiently, even after it removed the bottom vent. We’ll wait for the reviews to find out how those claims work out in real-world usage.

While $899 is still pricey for many buyers who don’t want to spend more than $500 on a new laptop, the Aspire S3 Ultrabook is certainly priced to compete with the MacBook Air — and other Ultrabooks. Does its announcement make you more likely to consider purchasing an Ultrabook? Let us know in the Talkback section.

Sean Portnoy is a freelance technology journalist.


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Intel readying Core i7-2700K CPU to spoil AMD Bulldozer launch?

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It looks like Intel may have a two-pronged approach to combating the imminent debut of AMD’s new Bulldozer desktop processors. Not only does the company plan to release its new Sandy Bridge-E “extreme” chips a few weeks after Bulldozer’s launch, but it also appears to have another CPU up its sleeve to send out against AMD’s new FX series.

CPU World sleuths noticed that Intel recently added a new box to its Material Declaration Data Sheets (MDDS) database that indicates that the company is preparing the Core i7-2700K, which would presumably replace the i7-2600K as the fastest non-extreme Sandy Bridge desktop processor. Unfortunately, there are no specs or other pertinent information about the chip, though CPU World assumes that it will be like the i7-2600K with four cores, Hyper-Threading, and 8MB L3 cache, but will carry a slightly higher clock speed.

Anandtech speculates that the pricing for the i7-2700K will be roughly $317, which will be higher than the top eight-core Bulldozers. Then again, if it can best AMD’s latest in performance testing, then enthusiasts might not mind the extra cost. The i7-2700K release could also pull the pricing of the i7-2600K down closer to the $266 price expected for the FX-8150.

In any event, it appears that Intel will have plenty of new product to battle with Bulldozer as the fourth quarter rolls on. But will it be able to blunt AMD’s momentum after it launches its latest chips?

Sean Portnoy is a freelance technology journalist.


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Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Poor sales of Chromebooks won't stop Google from promoting Chrome OS

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@ yphilogene

Barriers to entry in the PC and mobile phone ecosystems are much, much lower than barriers to entry in web search. The continued existence of free operating systems like Linux, in many cases without subsidies (e.g. from hardware or services firms), is very strong evidence of this. If you don't like Windows, you can install Linux or buy a Mac. If you don't like Mac OS, you can install Linux or Windows. If you don't like iOS, you can install Linux or buy an Android/Windows phone.

If you're an advertiser (Google's actual customers) and you don't like Google, what can you do? In the US, maybe you can advertise via Bing, but you'll immediately reduce your audience from about 70 per cent to about 30 per cent of the potential market. In most of Europe, Bing is still a 'beta' (including in Germany, which is the largest market in Europe), with insignificant market share, and Google effectively control the entire web search market.

The tricky thing is that advertisers won't switch until audiences switch. Without advertisers (customers), there's no revenue. Without revenue, the enormous costs of building and maintaining a search infrastructure lead to enormous losses. As a result, only firms with very deep pockets can even think about competing. This isn't like PCs (or in some cases even mobile phones) where you can offer cheap or even free alternatives, and customers can switch to them for free.

One of the cleverest tricks Google have managed to pull to keep away the competition authorities has been to claim that their customers are web search users, who can switch to a competitor with a click of the mouse. In fact, Google's customers are advertisers, who are far more locked into Google's web search platform than customers of Microsoft, Apple or Intel have ever been locked into any of their respective platforms -- especially here in Europe, where switching from Google to anything else would mean an advertiser would lose perhaps 95-99 per cent of the audience.

Google's trick has worked so far, but it's transparent to anyone who understand the technology and has studied the market. I think the competition authorities will catch on eventually. When they do, Google may be in very serious trouble.


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AMD introduces Radeon-branded system memory for consumers, graphics memory for video card makers

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Summary: While you wait for wait impatiently for the first Bulldozer chips to ship, AMD has released something to consider when you’re building your system around the new processors. The company has just introduced Radeon brand DDR3 SDRAM — that’s right, system memory — for consumers, and graphics memory for manufacturers of Radeon graphics cards. It’s unclear [...]

While you wait for wait impatiently for the first Bulldozer chips to ship, AMD has released something to consider when you’re building your system around the new processors. The company has just introduced Radeon brand DDR3 SDRAM — that’s right, system memory — for consumers, and graphics memory for manufacturers of Radeon graphics cards.

It’s unclear why AMD has decided now is the time to enter the memory business, and while AMD.com has information on Radeon memory, there’s been no formal launch of the new products. The chip company is releasing three lines of RAM that it claims are optimized for its new Llano APUs and Bulldozer CPUs, all in 2GB DIMMs: an Entertainment series, an Ultra Pro gaming series, and an Enterprise series for servers.

The Entertainment module runs at 1333MHz with 9-9-9 timings, whereas the gaming memory runs at 1600MHz with 11-11-11 timings. These specs are still “TBD” for the Enterprise series. This memory is apparently already available in Japan, though AMD’s silence means any kind of release dates for the U.S. are also TBD.

Radeon graphics memory is likewise divided into three lines: Value, Mainstream, and Gaming Entertainment. The former two use DDR3 (running at 800Mhz and 900MHz-1000MHz, respectively), while the latter is GDDR5 memory clocked from 1000MHz to 1500MHz. AMD says the graphics memory is “specially tuned to compliment and maximize the performance” of the latest Radeon cards.

Would you have any interest in buying Radeon memory for your new AMD build? Why or why not? Let us know in the Comments section.

[Via Fudzilla]

Sean Portnoy is a freelance technology journalist.


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Monday, November 28, 2011

Pricing revealed for some AMD Bulldozer desktop processors: eight cores for under $300

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Did crappy hardware doom the HP TouchPad?

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Summary: An interesting report has emerged from the postmortem for the TouchPad, the webOS-based tablet that HP dumped last week as part of a surprise pivot for the company away from consumer products. According to The Next Web, members of the webOS team have claimed that the hardware HP chose to build the TouchPad around was [...]

An interesting report has emerged from the postmortem for the TouchPad, the webOS-based tablet that HP dumped last week as part of a surprise pivot for the company away from consumer products. According to The Next Web, members of the webOS team have claimed that the hardware HP chose to build the TouchPad around was slow and old — based on an existing slate design HP had lying around that webOS was simply built into.

As proof, the team reportedly ran the same version of webOS on an Apple iPad 2, which ran it “significantly faster” than the TouchPad hardware. It even ran faster as a Web app in the iPad 2’s Safari browser and outperformed the HP version.

But not so fast, argues AnandTech. That site says that the webOS software, and not the Qualcomm Snapdragon chip powering the TouchPad. As proof, AnandTech cites the SunSpider Javascript Benchmark 0.9, which shows that the TouchPad was 2.5 times slower on this particular test than the iPad 2. The site’s conclusion:

What Palm managed to develop was an excellent UI and front end to an OS, but there’s little doubt that the underlying Linux code needed (and still needs) work. Simple tricks like disabling logging and implementing the boot process properly would result in noticeable performance gains. There’s little dobut that other similar simple things could dramatically improve performance.

The bottom line was the TouchPad was released with several crucial flaws that led to mediocre reviews, epitomized by our sister site CNET’s conclusion that “The TouchPad would have made a great competitor for the original iPad, but its design, features, and speed put it behind today’s crop of tablet heavyweights.”

Was it the hardware that hurt the TouchPad’s chances in the marketplace, or is the webOS team looking for a scapegoat as its livelihood has been thrown into jeopardy. We may never truly know now that the TouchPad has been relegated to the dustbin of tablet history.

[Image source: TechRepublic]

Sean Portnoy is a freelance technology journalist.


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